JACQUES MAR/TAIN
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art, and social action, within which conclusions may be freely
reached by competent methods, without reference to Catholic
dogma. Provided an individual is prepared to abandon his natu–
ralism or his religious heresy (atheism, Protestantism, Greek
orthodoxy, etc.), M. Maritain is willing to extend a friendly hand
to him.
It
matters not at all whether the individual is a Darwinian,
a Freudian, a logical empiricist, a Marxian socialist, yes, even a
Stalinist! But the interests of tha Catholic church must be served,
and so we find that M. Maritain at crucial points steps into the
realm of time and social struggle to settle issues concerning the
nature of mind, the state, political and moral hygiene (which
includes questions like the relation of church and state, education,
divorce, birth control, etc.) by reference to Catholic-Christian prin–
ciples whose validity is declared to be timeless.
The mysteries of Catholic dogma, which can best be stated in
negative terms, and cannot be justified on rational grounds, give
M.
Maritain a strategic vantage point. They enable him to criticize
any basic belief concerning man, which is not centered in the
Church, as inadequate, even when he admits a certain measure of
truth in its claims. In this way the Church appears as the reposi–
tory of all "truths" without being compelled to show how they can
all be rationally held. The unity which embraces all "truths,"
pruned of exaggeration, is a supernatural mystery. In practice,
i.e., in judgments applied to temporal institutions, this unity dis–
solves into the barest kind of eclecticism. For example, of the pes–
simism of the Reformation, M. Maritain can say that it "unduly
exaggerates the Christian concept of original sin." Of the optimism
of the Renaissance that it unduly exaggerates the equally Christian
but opposite concept "of the value of the human being." Man is
naturally evil but not only evil. Man is naturally good but not
merely good. The same may be said of human ignorance and
knowledge, ugliness al1;d beauty, weakness and strength. M. Mari–
tain is helpless, however, before a position which denies that men
are "naturally" either good or evil, and that the qualities of good
or evil are acquired by them in the course of time in relation to
each other. He lumps together
all
positions different from his own
-IS
relatively unimportant variations of the same essential heresy.
How like the procedure of the totalitarians! The integral
humanism of Catholicism offers men a choice between two alter-
